Despite Sega’s defeat in the home game console market, Sonic the Hedgehog has remained an iconic video game character. Mario can gain all sorts of powers and new attacks by eating random stuff he finds in boxes, but Sonic really just runs — that’s his thing. So that has to make you wonder, how fast does he actually run. Well, let’s just say he might want to rethink the name.

The smarties at The Escapist’s Game Theory video series took a closer look at the Sonic games to see just how fast the hedgehog was running. Using one of the cutscenes from the atrocious 2006 3D Sonic title, they were able to get an accurate measurement of his height at 1.1 meters. Using that number, it was easy to measure the length of the original Green Zone 1 at 259 meters. When you do the math, Sonic’s top speed turns out to be about 10 meters per second. The speed of sound? That’s 340 meters per second. Even Mario is faster than that in his first game.

But what about the speed boost shoes, you’re probably screaming. Well, those do make Sonic go quite a lot faster, but only three times his normal speed. 30 meters per second is nothing to sneeze at — that’s slightly faster than a Cheetah. The Cheetah isn’t making any claims about breaking the sound barrier, though. Cheetah’s have more class than that.

This is all based on the first game, but what about later ones? If you want to accept the 3D incarnations of Sonic as cannon, the blue one does occasionally reach higher speeds. In Sonic Unleashed there’s a scene where sonic runs a standard city block, which gives us a scale of reference. In this game, he’s running at 80 meters per second. That’s impressive, but far short of the speed of sound. More like sub-Sonic, am I right?